Hail, Holy Queen
on surgery, fear, and the Blessed Virgin
My surgery went well, thank God, while also being the physically toughest couple of weeks of my life. I was blindsided by the intensity of both the surgery and the aftermath. Now I’m resting at home and grateful to be slowly regaining my strength. So today, on the Feast of the Assumption, I want to write about something that happened a few months earlier, that has to do with fear, prayer, and the Blessed Virgin.
This begins with a scary part of my health ordeal early on that was so frightening I don’t want to go into the details. Suffice it to say, it meant facing the possibility of having to go into surgery not even knowing what kind of surgery I would be getting or what diagnosis would result. I thought I would write about something that got me through those difficult days.
After a lifetime of atheism and my conversion to Christianity about seven years ago, praying to God has become a constant that runs throughout my day. I also love the vast breadth of the prayers of the Church, from the formal liturgy of the hours, to the rosary, to the myriad novenas to saints. While God is undoubtedly all that we need, we were designed for connection to friends and family. The saints, like the Blessed Virgin, are friends and family who have gone before us in the pilgrimage of life. We are called to pray for each other, not to dictate the outcome of events (as if we could), but to join in God’s dream of our life. So, as the saints are alive in heaven, we ask them to pray for us, the same as we ask our friends and family to pray for us.
Some people see this and think Catholics worship Mary and the saints. This is not true. Worship is emphatically reserved for God alone. And, to quote Marie Mazzanti, “If you think Catholics worship Mary, it might be a good sign that you no longer understand the Biblical concept of worship. If you’re not giving God anything more than what we Catholics offer to Mary, the problems isn’t that we’re doing too much for Mary, but that you’re doing too little for God.”
So, when I was facing the scary moment above, I fled to the greatest saint of them all, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary played a pivotal role in bringing me to the Catholic church and was my confirmation saint. I’ve been wanting to write about this for years but have never felt myself up to the task, so for now I will just say this: after years of lingering in what CS Lewis referred to as “the hallway” - being Christian but not knowing what kind of Christian - I found myself ineluctably drawn to Mary. I even dreamed of her guiding me down a rose-strewn highway toward her son. As Mary is known for doing, the closer I drew to her, the closer I drew to Christ. In all the previous years I had never imagined my personal relationship with him deepening in such dizzying ways.
The earliest Christians had a vibrant devotion to Mary based on unshakeable scriptural foundations. Reading the Bible as it is meant to be read, in a complex symphony of literal and symbolic meanings reflecting upon one another, we can understand Mary as radiant with significance, she is the new Eve, the Ark of the New Covenant, and the archetype of a Davidic queen. In this way Mary’s role is that of advocate, someone who presents petitions on behalf of others. In the Gospel of John, the last thing Christ does before his death is give Mary as mother to the beloved disciple – and, hence, as mother to us all. So, she prays for us as any mother would pray for their child.
What is so beautiful, though, is that when we think of Mary, we always think of Christ. Mary cannot be thought of apart from him: Mary’s every moment, every action, every utterance, was an example of sublime faith. Her entire life was an offering to God. As Scott Hahn writes, “far from detracting from Christ’s saving work, she exemplifies it.” Because Mary was the way Christ chose to reveal himself to us, by drawing closer to her, we can gain a deeper knowledge of him.
In the days when I did not yet know what surgery or diagnosis I would be facing, what I yearned for more than anything was acceptance of God’s will. My mind returned again and again to the Annunciation, that moment when the angel Gabriel told Mary she would have a son and Mary willingly stepped into the unfolding drama of the world’s salvation. That moment, like her entire life, was “an unconditional and unequivocal yes to God.”
Mary exemplifies this kind of trust in God, a trust that lets us know that nothing in life is random, that every moment “contains an astonishing supernatural depth.” With this knowledge, “there is only one way to live: abandonment to divine providence.” Mary rooted herself “in the truth that the presence of God is reality” and she shows us something revolutionary: “our life, as it really is, contains all that is necessary for a life of holiness.”
Honestly, I can’t claim to be any good at that. But I know that one of the best ways to get better at it is to meditate upon Mary. This is why when I was consumed with fear at the beginning of my health woes, I did the Mary, Undoer of Knots Novena, in which we ask Mary to pray that the knots we face in our life be undone. As the days of this novena went by, I found myself feeling strangely lighter and more confident in the outcome of what I was facing. This is not normal for me, typically I spiral into ever more obsessive worry. Again, prayer is not about getting what we want (though sometimes that happens), but about uniting our will to God’s. And doing this novena, I felt I was able to get a glimpse of what that must feel like. And then, at the end of the nine day novena, I learned that the medical situation had resolved and I would not be facing such a daunting challenge. My relief was overwhelming and my gratitude endless.
After nearly a lifetime of atheism, I am profoundly grateful to be Christian. Life is not easy and Christianity does not promise that it will be, in some ways it is even harder, but it is also far richer, vaster, wilder, stranger, and true.
To learn more about Mary, here are two of the best books (from which all the above quotes are taken) I can recommend: “Hail, Holy Queen” by Scott Hahn and “Mary and the Interior Life” by Jeremiah Myriam Shrycock.